I am Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, Senior Advisor for Entitlement Reform and Budget Policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation, General Counsel for the American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. I served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush. I am a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
I write about new, cutting edge ideas regarding public policy, particularly concerning economics.

Sorry Global Warming Alarmists, The Earth Is Cooling

Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in Chicago. I attended, and served as one of the speakers, talking about The Economic Implications of High Cost Energy.

The conference featured serious natural science, contrary to the self-interested political science you hear from government financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies, or government body wannabees, such as the United Nations. See for yourself, as the conference speeches are online.

What you will see are calm, dispassionate presentations by serious, pedigreed scientists discussing and explaining reams of data. In sharp contrast to these climate realists, the climate alarmists have long admitted that they cannot defend their theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming in public debate. With the conference presentations online, let’s see if the alarmists really do have any response.

The Heartland Institute has effectively become the international headquarters of the climate realists, an analog to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has achieved that status through these international climate conferences, and the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered volumes, produced in conjunction with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Those Climate Change Reconsidered volumes are an equivalently thorough scientific rebuttal to the irregular Assessment Reports of the UN’s IPCC. You can ask any advocate of human caused catastrophic global warming what their response is to Climate Change Reconsidered. If they have none, they are not qualified to discuss the issue intelligently.

Check out the 20th century temperature record, and you will find that its up and down pattern does not follow the industrial revolution’s upward march of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the supposed central culprit for man caused global warming (and has been much, much higher in the past). It follows instead the up and down pattern of naturally caused climate cycles.

For example, temperatures dropped steadily from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. The popular press was even talking about a coming ice age. Ice ages have cyclically occurred roughly every 10,000 years, with a new one actually due around now.

In the late 1970s, the natural cycles turned warm and temperatures rose until the late 1990s, a trend that political and economic interests have tried to milk mercilessly to their advantage. The incorruptible satellite measured global atmospheric temperatures show less warming during this period than the heavily manipulated land surface temperatures.

Central to these natural cycles is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Every 25 to 30 years the oceans undergo a natural cycle where the colder water below churns to replace the warmer water at the surface, and that affects global temperatures by the fractions of a degree we have seen. The PDO was cold from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, and it was warm from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, similar to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).

In 2000, the UN’s IPCC predicted that global temperatures would rise by 1 degree Celsius by 2010. Was that based on climate science, or political science to scare the public into accepting costly anti-industrial regulations and taxes?

Don Easterbrook, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Western Washington University, knew the answer. He publicly predicted in 2000 that global temperatures would decline by 2010. He made that prediction because he knew the PDO had turned cold in 1999, something the political scientists at the UN’s IPCC did not know or did not think significant.

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Peter Ferrara – Odd. You guys on the denier side have been reciting that Trenberth quote about the missing heat being a travesty for years, but you don’t seem to know what he meant. He was talking about the difference between incoming solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation as measured by the CERES satellites. ASR-OLR = earth’s energy budget. The satellites were showing more heat trapped on earth than he could acount for on the earth’s surface. http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/ISSI_fulltext.pdf Note that ERBE and CERES satellites have been measuring the top of atmosphere radiation fluxes.

You misunderstand the tropospheric hot spot. That is a function of moist adiabatic lapse, and it is a region where convection has brought heat from the ocean surface to the troposphere. It is a characteristic of any global warming, manmade or not. The problem is not that the “hot spot” is absent. It is that the hot spot has been poorly measured. This article explains some of the problems: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/tropical-tropopshere-ii/

The proof of manmade global warming is stratospheric cooling, which occurs because infrared radiation is blocked by CO2 in the troposphere. Stratospheric cooling has been measured: http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html

Face it: Retired geologist Easterbrook has been spinning his “global cooling” fantasy for over a decade…the hottest decade on record. He’s wrong. Easterbrook isn’t a climate scientist, and the Heartlanders who have some sort of climate science background don’t seem to be doing active research in the field. At any rate, they are throwing up ludicrous objections to the prevailing science. Most ludicrous of all is the claim that the earth is cooling, when the past eleven years were the hottest on record.

Icarus, The hot spot argument is definitive because it falsifies the UN’s IPCC Climate models, on which the IPCC’s argument for human caused catastrophic global warming is based. Just as the climate models are made up and not real world data, so is the theory of human caused catastrophic global warming made up.

The lack of the hot spot, or global warming signature, predicted by the IPCC’s climate models is demonstrated by the satellite data and measurements by weather balloons. There is no problem measuring it. There is a problem with climate alarmists dealing with it.

Actually, from the point of view of whether AGW is true, the so-called hot spot is irrelevant. It should be present regardless of the source of warming. Since measured land, ocean, and satellite temperature readings all show warming, there is no question that the earth s warming. I take it that you didn’t read the Real Climate article. The “hot spot” is not absent. Try reading this: http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/skepticsdenialists-part-2-hotspots-and-repetition/ Key point: “Warming the troposphere or cooling the stratosphere tends to increase tropopause height. If this were the whole argument, the tropopause height increase is real. But the “hotspot” refers to the fact that the surface-to-troposphere temperature gradient decreases. Interestingly, since the greenhouse effect depends on the lapse rate, models produce a negative feedback to this change in temperature gradient. If David Evans is correct about the hotspot not being real, then the most intuitive implication would be toward a heightened climate sensitivity.” Not only is the hot spot real, but if it were not, climate sensitivity (the warming due to an increase in a forcing such as CO2) would be greater.

In regard to models: As I’m sure you know, climate models are sets of equations which show the relationships among the independent variables that affect the target variable (global temperatures, eg.) The mathematical models run real world data to reach conclusions. Since you claim to be an economist, I have to assume that you know how models work (although economic models tend to be less complex than climate models. So your claim that models are “made up and not real world data,” is, I have to assume, a deliberate lie.

So the hotspot that all these wonderful measuring devices all over the world cannot find a scant 8 to 10 km up is now irrelevant, according to the great twit — Dallass. My, one of the fundamentals of AGW isn’t needed anymore. What a relief!

@@@@ New paper contradicts a tenet of global warming theory A paper published today in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics finds that clouds located in the stratosphere over the poles act to cool the stratosphere by adiabatic cooling, which is the cooling of air parcels as they rise and expand, rather than by ‘trapping heat’ below the clouds resulting in ‘radiative cooling’ of the stratosphere above. This finding contradicts a tenet of AGW theory, which predicts that infrared radiation from greenhouse gases will ‘trap heat’ to create a ‘hot spot’ in the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere. This study finds that cooling of the stratosphere is instead due to rising air parcels rather than a decrease in radiation due to heat ‘trapped by greenhouse gases’.

DallasDunlap, You are very good at making stuff up and believing whatever you want to believe, like the land, ocean and satellite temperature readings all show warming. I am surprised you didn’t cite last week’s baseball scores as showing warming too. But I am not surprised that you cited your comrades at Real Climate, who are the guardians not of climate science but of the red part of the watermelon. They are much better than you at changing the story whenever it suits them, as the hotspot does not refer to the fact that the surface to troposhere temperature gradient decreases, but to a hotspot in the upper troposphere where atmospheric temperatures reach their maximum. Hence the term hotSPOT. As the real world data confirmed no hotspot, which the IPCC’s climate models had predicted, we saw the ridiculous scramble to redefine the hotspot, or to claim well the problem really is in measuring it. The real problem is that no hotspot means the IPCC climate models have been falsified, which the recent temperature record does as well. And that reveals the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming to be a greater scientific scandal than Lysenkoism.

for there to be a GREENHOUSE effect there has to be an EFFECT to start with. go find the term used to describe heat on gases. then look up what atmospehric scintillation (AS) is and how heat on gases would effect that. heat on gases casues MOTION. MOTION increases AS. for every ground based optical device would need to be ajusted to compensate for that increase in the effect. no adjustments have been made therefore, no adjustments = no increase in motion = no increase in heat content. dont get me started on ir astromony…they cant find any extra heat either! hers a question for you dale, does co2 trap/amplify heat?